Enabling the Zimbra Dumpster, or how to recover email after it has been deleted from the trash folder

Purpose

With Dumpster the users (and more importantly, admins) can recover deleted files (Emails, Contacts, Calendar or apointments, Tasks, Files, etc.) from a period of time. This feature is really useful to recover specific files deleted by mistake, and makes the life of the System Administrator, and also of the users, much easier. This KB is oriented to show how to Enable Dumpster and how to operate with this feature.

Resolution

You can operate Dumpster with the next 4 settings:

zimbraDumpsterEnabled – TRUE/FALSE determines if the dumpster feature is enabled or disabled.

zimbraDumpsterPurgeEnabled – TRUE/FALSE determines if the users can empty/purge their dumpster.

zimbraDumpsterUserVisibleAge – n, where n is the number of days to allow users to view and recover the messages stored in the dumpster.

zimbraMailDumpsterLifetime – n, where n is the number of days to keep items stored in the dumpster before automatically purging them.

Example 1: Dumpster per COS, Users allowed, 30 days retention

In this Dumpster example, users can recover items, it will show files for the last 30 days, and items older than 30 days will be autopurged: (replace default with the COS you are working with)

Example 2: Dumpster per COS, Users disabled, 365 days retention

In this Dumpster example, users cannot recover items (need to ask an administrator, and will show the files for the last 30 days) and will keep items for 365 days for auditing purposes, items older than 365 days will be autopurged: (replace default with the COS you are working with)

Example 3: Search in the Dumpster per user

If the users cannot recover items, they will ask an Administrator to recover the items that they need. First, search in the Dumpster, for example: Just emails (messages) and larger than 1KB (means all)

Example 4: Recover elements from the Dumpster per user

If the users cannot recover the items, they will ask an Administrator to recover the items that they need. This example shows how an Admin can recover certain items. The syntax needs to contain the ID for the Item to recover, see the below step, and also needs to contain the destination Folder to recover the item.

zmmailbox -z -m admin@mail.zimbra.io recoverItem 287 Inbox

Example 5: Empty the Dumpster per user

Sometimes we can have Disk space problems, and we need to remove/purge the Dumpster for certain users.

zmmailbox -z -m user@example.com -A emptyDumpster

Example 6: Delete certain elements from the Dumpster per user

Sometimes we can have Disk space problems, and we need to remove/purge certain elements from the Dumpster for certain users.